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In Romanian literary histories, Cezar Petrescu is presented as a popular writer, but one that fails to integrate his work among the canonical pieces, due to the fact that most of his novels lacked what critics called “aesthetical value.” The quantitative and transnational turns in the study of the novel in Romania set the ground for revisiting such counter-canonical authors in order to re-examine, from social and sociological perspectives, their works. Cezar Petrescu’s novels seem suited for a socio-critical analysis, therefore, in this article I aim to discuss literary representations of capitalist alienation and consumerism in Calea Victoriei, one of his most popular novels. Keywords: Cezar Petrescu, Calea Victoriei, urban novel, capitalism, alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employed in the study of national or transnational literatures, the relevance of digital humanities, computational analyses, and quantitative sociology can no longer be ignored. In this paper, we aim to argue that, in spite of it still being seen as a niche endeavor, the digital or quantitative study of literature generates paradigmatic shifts in literary scholarship, both in literary criticism and comparative studies. In order to demonstrate this statement, the following study will illustrate how three core principles of digital humanities are actively shaping humanities as we know it. These principles – openness, replicability, and collaboration – challenge the way we understand the role of the literary historian and their „traditional” tasks. To consolidate this argumentation further, we will briefly present an example of how digital humanities start changing the dominant narrative in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the 2020 article on identity diversity in the Romanian novel, this study provides both a statistical account and individual examples of fictional representations of characters in the Romanian novel between 1933-1947. With a three-fold structure, our essay focuses at first on gender diversity, analyzing the ratios between female and male authors and female and male protagonists. It then concentrates on religious, ethnic, and national minorities, using both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, exploring how they are represented and approached. Without drawing any definitive conclusions, our undertaking provides a blueprint for further research on identity representations in the Romanian novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to present how the Romanian romance novel written between late 19th century and the Second World War fictionalized some of the gender codes active in that particular timeframe in social and familial contexts. A very popular subgenre amid the unprofessional readers, romance fiction rises a new kind of responsibility for literary critics and historians, that traditionally gave little to no attention to the matter of toxic gender codes found in these novels. This article attempts to analyse, by means of both close and distant reading tools, a few narrative aspects that encoded gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining the instruments of quantitative analysis with those of genre theory, the present article studies the ratio, characteristics, and tendencies underpinning the most important subgenres of the Romanian novel between 1901 and 1932. Among these subgenres, we lay special emphasis on those of popular fiction, on the social, historical, sentimental, psychological, and philosophical novel, as well as on the so-called "event novel". The conclusions of our inquiry illustrate the ever-growing divide between artistic literature and popular fiction, the recasting of the Romanian novelistic subgenres during the early 20th century, and the gradual relocation of the novelists' focus from the unmediated depiction of events towards the world and the individual self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following study employs a quantitative analysis of the Romanian novelistic production from the period 1901- 1932. By using the literary corpus developed by the research project ASTRA Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932, implemented by ASTRA National Museum Complex, this paper focuses on the secondary canonical writers (with their "b-sides and rarities"), the novelists'origins, the abundance and the geographical nodes of production, in order to investigate the dynamic relation between national cultural centers and their respective editorial networks, as well as the mechanisms of canonization within the Romanian novel of the period [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to present, by means of a metacritical approach, the many shifts and negotiations in the history of understanding and defining the status of the novel as a literary genre, as they are retraced by Galin Tihanov in his latest book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory. Interwoven with many other aspects of Russian literary theory that reverberated within the present paradigm of comparative studies and helped shape the principal framework of world literature, Galin Tihanov's critical assumptions on the numerous trials regarding the novelistic genre in the Russian theoretical undertakings are of tremendous relevance for a field of study that engages, more than ever, in cracking the many codes of the novelistic world canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches a series of conceptual optimizations of the subgenres of the Romanian 19th century novels established by the Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel from Origins to 1989 (2004). Starting by analyzing the corpus of works digitized for ASTRA Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the 19th Century Romanian Novel, the authors revisit possible definitions of some of the most preeminent and discussed typologies of the 19th century novel production in Romania: the outlaw novel, the social novel, the novel of manners, the rural novel, the historical novel, the sensation novel, the erotic novel, and the family novel. The central goal of the article is, therefore, to shape a taxonomy that fits the formal, thematical, and rhetorical variety of the Romanian novel in the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study assesses the existing archives that gather and preserve in digital versions the Romanian novel published in the 19 th century. Digitalization projects, both in Romania and in Europe, are the main subjects of this research. Adding to this, we share the particular and common experiences of the Astra Data Mining: The Digital Museum of the 19th Century Romanian Novel in terms of the process of digitizing the 157 novels in our corpus. Other details such as the specific editions digitized, the process of selection, as well as any difficulties met along the way are also provided. At the same time, the activities of our project are also corroborated with similar European projects. In order to address our digitization practice, we also explore a theoretical and methodological framework borrowed by Stanford Literary Lab in terms of conceptualizing what the American researchers call "the published", "the archive" and "the corpus". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from the most recent developments in the field of Digital Humanities, the article showcases some of the most promising methods as well as some of the most useful tools for computational textual analysis. Textometry, stylometry and network analysis (alongside topic modelling or distributional semantics) are nowadays methods that, through the recent developments in digital formalism proposed by Matthew L. Jockers or the researchers from Stanford Literary Lab, are able to reveal literary and cultural patterns at a macroanalytical method. The article will delve into computational stylistics by testing the Stylo package, developed by Maciej Eder, Jan Rybicki and Mike Kestemont, on a sample corpus provided by the ASTRA Data Mining Project, attempting to explore the merits of such methods in the field of Romanian literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to investigate if and how the theoretical assumptions and the ideological discourse of the Romanian literary historian and cultural figure E. Lovinescu can still be read and interpreted within contemporary, transnational frames and with new methodological tools. I propose for this study to discuss a couple of volumes, each one engaging in a different kind of approach to E. Lovinescu's impact on the Romanian cultural field, in order to test the viability of his theories, especially from a sociological and political point of view. The goal of my paper shall be to open a discussion on the ongoing role that canonical literary historians such as E. Lovinescu have on how we study, to date, Romanian literature, while also framing the rather unknown faces of socio-political discourse that this particular cultural figure has proposed over the time, aiming to present how they shaped the circulation of foreign ideologies and literary formulas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tries to adapt recent methodologies used in literary studies such as macroanalysis and quantitative research to the Romanian novel from the first half of the twentieth century. The main focus of the present paper is on the erotic novel and its evolution from a simple literary exercise that followed Western plot patterns to its aesthetic apex in the 30s. By employing the theories or Franco Moretti, the article also attempts to reveal the trajectory of the erotic novel as a literary mirror into the modernisation of Romanian literature itself. Aspects such as import literature (as narrative models) and the circulation of Western literary trends in the Romanian cultural field will also be kept in mind for the purpose of understanding of how Romanian prose developed over the course of the aforementioned period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper aims to recontextualise the works of Ion Luca Caragiale by means of applying the contemporary methodologies of World Literature studies in order to inscribe the author in an international literary circuit. At the same time, the study will also try to investigate I.L. Caragiale as a transnational author, for his catalytic influence on the New Wave of Romanian cinema, by far the most exportable autochthonous cultural product. For this, the paper proposes to discuss Caragiale as an author not in the classical terms of canonicity and Romanian literary classicism, but as a continuous influence for a rather „alternative canon” that can be identified in Romanian cinematography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]